Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Sometimes you don’t need to have read a thousand-page novel to understand just how complex the life of the writer is, and how they are striving to illuminate the life of sadness, of melancholic love. Occasionally a string of carefully laid out vignettes will achieve the same aim, signed, sealed, and delivered with open heart, For Sarah, for all that feel the time to heal when tragedy or adversity, strikes at the very centre of our world.
In any art form, the dedication is always an act of memory, as well as thanks, it is the acknowledgement of existence, of passion, of shared times and experiences, and to receive such a moment is to be as immortalised as the art that generated the feeling in the first place. The person being remembered lives on, even if circumstances and time may remove their presence from our sight, they are forever mentioned in spirit, in someone else’s story.
For Kenneth J. Nash, the series of vignettes is undoubtedly a reflective peace of mind, a moment of breathing out when for so long, and due to the reasons in which the album came about, he and his wife could arguably be seen to being so heroic, stoic in the face of sadness and adversity, that they must have found it difficult to ever contemplating breathing in the air around them with the same sense of purpose.
For Sarah, a dedication and a response to those times, and what may have started out as a couple of songs in which to feel back in tune and in step with life, has become a true sense of life captured at its most raw, at its weather beaten and majestic best. The point of memory is not to be destroyed by it, but to find ways to soothe the beast that stokes the forces us to be disquiet and ill sought by the world’s fortune.
Across songs such as She’s The One, And Around Again, Sunday Night Rain, the superb Sunflower Zen Blues, Chartreuse and Lady, the strength of love and fortitude are to be found entwined as one with sympathy and the damage of regret; For Sarah is indeed an album of beauty brought on by extremes, and one that is simply the finest piece of artistic work to date for the musician. An album that restores the meaning of faith in human nature, and the belief that somewhere someone will always remember us, in spirit, indeed, in art.
Outstanding from first to last, Kenneth J. Nash’s For Sarah is perfect.
Kenneth J Nash releases For Sarah on September 25th on Old Hotel Records.
Ian D. Hall